Combining Threads and RPC

By combining threads and a remote procedure call (RPC) package, you can exploit nonshared-memory multiprocessors, such as a collection of workstations. This combination distributes your application relatively easily and treats the collection of workstations as a multiprocessor.

For example, one thread might create additional threads. Each of these children could then place a remote procedure call, invoking a procedure on another workstation. Although the original thread has merely created threads that are now running in parallel, this parallelism involves other computers.

The Message Processing Interface (MPI) might be a more effective approach to achieve multithreading in applications that run across distributed systems. See http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/ for more information about MPI.

The Sun HPC ClusterTools^TM software includes Open MPI Message Passing Interface (OMPI), which is an open source implementation of MPI. See the Sun HPC ClusterTools product page for more information about ClusterTools.